Wagner Moura, second from right, is tremendous as Armando in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Secret Agent.Uncredited/The Associated Press
The Secret Agent
Written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Starring Wagner Moura, Carlos Francisco and Udo Kier
Classification 14A; 158 minutes
Opens in select theatres Dec. 5
Critic’s Pick
Beware the film critics who turn into filmmakers – they’ll either turn you off the medium entirely, or find something inside of it so startlingly new that it’ll make you reconsider smack-talking any reviewers you happen to disagree with, lest they turn out to be your new favourite auteur. (Don’t worry, I harbour no delusions of going that route, so smack-talk away.)
Fortunately, the case of Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho falls squarely into the latter category. A journalism school graduate who began his career writing criticism for a series of national daily newspapers, Mendonça Filho gradually transitioned into one of the country’s most celebrated, boundary-pushing artists. His 2016 political drama Aquarius feels like the restless cry of an entire nation, while his 2019 genre-blurring cult hit Bacurau is a wild anti-colonialism polemic that resembles a thousand sharp-tongued film reviews diced into pieces and thrown into a blender. Thank goodness he is tearing up the screen, instead of writing about what unfolds on it.
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Yet as compelling and strong as Mendonça Filho’s output has so far been, The Secret Agent is the film destined to launch him so far beyond his criticism background that his newspaper days will feel like a mere footnote. Fiery and relentlessly paced (its 158 minutes don’t contain a minute of bloat), the political thriller pivoting around themes of paranoia and resistance feels perfectly tuned to the moment, even if it is set in 1977. That’s when a man purporting to be a teacher named Armando (Wagner Moura) arrives in the coastal city of Recife, smack during the annual carnival holiday. The nation is in the grips of a dictatorship, the streets are sweltering, the mood is manic and Armando is obviously hiding something of the utmost importance.
Carefully, Mendonça Filho colours in Armando’s world, a realm filled with freedom fighters and corrupt cops, assassins and fugitives. Everyone is a target, and no one is beyond suspicion – but at the same time, the entire city also seems to be under the hypnotizing cultural spell of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, which has just been released in Brazilian theatres, and comes to play a role in Armando’s tale that is hilariously absurd.
Relentlessly paced, The Secret Agent feels perfectly tuned to the present despite its setting in the 1970s.Elevation Pictures
While my first viewing of The Secret Agent at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this spring left me slightly deflated – I had gone in expecting something more closely aligned with the delightfully unpredictable Bacurau – a repeat viewing uncovered just how carefully the filmmaker had built a time machine of sorts. The Secret Agent is not only mining the director’s own personal cinematic education – it is rich in homages to everything from The Parallax View and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Shivers and, of course, Jaws – but also excavating an entire nation’s past.
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Wagner, who most North American audiences might know best from his role as the villainous cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar on Netflix’s Narcos, is tremendous as the avatar Mendonça Filho deploys to pull back the darker pages of Brazil’s history. (The actor also makes the best use of the film’s unbuttoned-shirt aesthetic – you will never see so much chest, or chest hair, in your life.) And the late Udo Kier, who made such a memorable pop-up appearance in Bacurau, is just as enjoyable a wild card here, playing a Holocaust survivor who endures the worst possible case of mistaken identity.
While Mendonça Filho’s contemporary Paul Thomas Anderson is currently receiving the lion’s share of end-of-year hosannas for his similarly themed (and excellent) treatise on the pains of resistance, One Battle After Another, audiences hungry for ferociously alive political filmmaking would do well to turn their coats to The Secret Agent, too. Even if only to give hope to every other critic out there who dreams of escaping to the other side of the screen.